For weeks there have been patches getting the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation to OpenGL 4.6 while mainline Mesa has been at OpenGL 3.0 support. Thankfully the out-of-tree patch delta is being reduced and this week in Mesa 20.3-devel the code has been upstreamed getting the support level to OpenGL 3.3.

More code review of the Zink work-in-progress code is still needed for getting mainline Mesa to OpenGL 4.6 for this Gallium3D driver

The POWER architecture changes have been submitted for the Linux 5.10 kernel. As expected, the PowerPC 601 support is retired as that original 32-bit PowerPC processor from the early 90's.

The PowerPC 601 support is cleared out with Linux 5.10 since it's no longer actively being used on new kernel releases and not part of any default kernel configuration. Given the PowerPC 601 is sufficiently different from later models, it's beneficial to remove

The perf tool updates have been sent in for the ongoing Linux 5.10 merge window.

The tool updates for Linux 5.10 now allow reporting L2 prefetch events and iTLB instruction fetch hit events for Zen 1.

But besides those belated bits for Zen 1, there is also initial Zen 3 (Family 19h) perf tool support. That Zen 3 support is enabled by currently matching Zen 2 events with no new Zen 3 metrics currently being exposed.

Other perf tool improvements with Linux 5.

NGG ( Next-Gen Geometry ) ended up being fairly buggy/problematic for Navi but it looks like for the upcoming Radeon RX 6000 (RDNA 2 / Navi 2) launch that it's in better shape.

The NGG support for Navi 1x involved a lot of driver work from at times enabling it only to disable some functionality to other tweaks in avoiding hangs or other problems around it.

There still is two weeks to go until the big Navi launch but the latest open-source AMD Radeon

OverlayFS as the Linux union mount file-system that allows combining multiple underlying mount points into one is seeing a new feature with Linux 5.10.

This decade-old alternative to the likes of AuFS and UnionFS is used by the likes of the OpenWrt project and also can be used for container/Docker use-cases too. The main new feature of the OverlayFS changes for Linux 5.10 is the introduction of a new "volatile" mode exposed via the new mount option of the same name.

The GNU Compiler Collection 11 (GCC 11) will be ending stage one development in mid-November to get the release process underway.

SUSE's Richard Biener issued the first GCC 11.0 status report and indicated that stage one development will end on 15 November. This stage of development is for the generic development of this next major GCC release and where all new feature code changes are allowed.

After 15 November is when stage three development begins (per their current processes, there is not

Intel issued a notable open-source Compute Runtime stack update today that provides OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support for the company's graphics processors from Xe/Gen12 graphics back through Gen8 Broadwell hardware.

Making today's release so notable is that OpenCL 3.0 is now enabled for all supported hardware . While OpenCL 3.0 was available for months in provisional form, Intel's Compute-Runtime has offered it for Gen12/Tigerlake while keeping existing generations on OpenCL 2.1.

It seems AMD's Linux graphics driver team is firing with precision on all cylinders these days. Not only have they been working on timely support for the Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA 2" / "Big Navi" Linux driver support ahead of the official launch and have the initial code already upstreamed in Linux 5.9, but they've even been going back with a number of fixes for older graphics processors.

In recent months they have been making a number of improvements for older GPUs including the